2007 Archive Edition - See the Archive Notice on the Project
Homepage for more information.

About The Ecole Initiative

The Early Church On-Line Encyclopedia (Ecole) Initiative is a
cooperative effort on the part of scholars across the internet to
establish a hypertext encyclopedia of early Church history (to the
Reformation) on the World-Wide Web. In principle, authors of the various
articles that make up the encyclopedia maintain their own articles at
their own locations. Each article is connected to the Ecole Initiative's
Title Index, which can be accessed at any time by clicking on the
Ecole icon (see the top left corner above) anywhere it appears in the
encyclopedia. In addition, each article is linked directly to related
articles and other information available on the Web. Each article is also
linked to the Contributors' Index, which provides a brief biography for
each author along with links to other articles by the same author. The
Contributor's Index can be accessed by clicking on the author's name at
the bottom of each article. Some authors welcome your questions, comments
and observations about their articles. This invitation is indicated by a
sensitive mail icon after the author's
name.

The
Ecole Chronology Project supports a two-dimensional chronology that
allows users to view data organized according to both place and time by
way of a special program that creates space/time indices on demand. To
sample the chronology, check out 313 CE. The
Ecole Glossary contains short, 100-200 word glosses that are
intimately tied to the chronology and to each other.

Links that follow a letter in a blue box (e.g., ) refer to other sites
in the Ecole Initiative, with the exception of chronological items which receive no
indicator. (The reader may assume that all highlighted dates point to the chronology.) is used to
designate articles, while designates items in the
glossary.
is used for items not covered by the above. The [DOC] symbol points to a version of the
document previously named somewhere on the internet beyond the Ecole Initiative. When
referring to an Ecole document, [ DOC] will be used.

The cut-off date for the project is around 1500 CE. Articles that are
about topics slightly after 1500 are included in the Title Index, provided
that they fall within the spirit of the pre-Reformation period. However,
anticipating that the project will one day be expanded to the Reformation
and beyond, the Ecole Initiative will include articles on topics that fall
beyond the cut-off date. These articles are linked to the Ecole
Supplement, which can be found at the bottom of the Title Index page.

The Ecole Initiative maintains five pages of links to existing
early Church resources on the internet. The
Early
Church Documents page (no longer available - Ed., 2007) lists primary sources that are either from
the early Church period or pertinent to it in some way. The
Index of
Images (no longer available - Ed., 2007) lists links to relevant pictures. The
Internet Mailing Lists page provides brief descriptions of internet
listservs that are topically related to the encyclopedia, along with
directions for signing on to them. The Miscellaneous
Information page provides links to tables, charts, the homepages of
early Church scholars, and other relevant pages on the internet.
Finally, the Word-Wide Web Sites page offers
access to a variety of project sites that might interest those who are
concerned with the early Church.

Readers of the Ecole Encyclopedia may wish to participate in an on-going
electronic conference dedicated to early Church history and receive
regular updates concerning recent developments in the encyclopedia. To
join the conference and receive the updates, send the message "subscribe
ecole-readers" (do not include quote marks) to majordomo@evansville.edu. Include
only the subscribe command in the body of your message. Majordomo will
respond with an information file about interacting with the Ecole readers'
group, and you should start receiving mail soon thereafter.

Individual authors are solely responsible for the content of their
articles and retain the copyright to their portion of the Ecole
Initiative on the understanding that their article may be reproduced so
long as the entire article, including the header and the copyright
notice at the bottom of each page, remain intact. The Ecole Initiative
welcomes proposals from authors with academic credentials. The proposal
procedure is explained on a page set aside for
Submissions.

Finally, the Ecole Initiative is a work that is continually in
progress; it makes no pretense to being a finished product. Thus, there
is always room for implementing new suggestions. If you have an idea
that would improve the encyclopedia and would like to share it with the
Editorial Board, please email your suggestion to ecole@evansville.edu.

The ECOLE Initiative "has been selected by The McKinley Group's
professional editorial team as a "4-Star" site. This is the highest
rating an Internet site can achieve in Magellan, McKinley's comprehensive Internet
directory of over 1.5 million sites and 40,000 reviews." It has also been
reviewed and included in Point's Index
of the Top 5% of the World Wide Web, and it has won the "hot sites"
award from the Association for Religion
and Intellectual Life.